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Valley
News March 26, 2004
Donald Maurice Kreis
Thomas
Jefferson has finally been vanquished in Lebanon! Thomas Jefferson
the architect, that is.
See
for yourself by driving up to the main entrance of the Dartmouth
Hitchcock Medical Center. Behold the familiar scene of ponderous
symmetry, a throwback to famous Jefferson buildings like Monticello
and the University of Virginia library, rendered here with a bland
office-park aesthetic in metal panels of white and Dartmouth green.
Then
look to the right, at the newly tall Norris Cotton Cancer Center.
Now nine stories in height (including the mechanical penthouse)
after a $31 million renovation, the cancer center retains the boxy
profile characteristic of the hospital’s vast and growing facilities.
But jazzily appended to the right-hand corner of the tower, taking
up most of the main façade, is a kind of module encased in a glass
curtain wall, ablaze by night with the glow of the gold-colored
atrium spaces within. It breaks the box, so to speak, because
it projects outward by precisely two feet, eight inches. Who let
this happen?
“There’s
a kind of sensory experience that starts to make the building resonate,”
explains architect Malcolm Kent, the cancer center project’s design
principal and one of the guilty parties. According to Kent, he
and his colleagues at the Boston firm of Shepley, Bulfinch Richardson
and Abbott sought to “animate” this important piece of DHMC, which
itself is just a part of the institution’s ongoing $224 million
“Project for Progress” expansion program.
Granted,
the cancer center’s new look is not as radical as the wild curving
modules of the new Stata Center at MIT, similar in program to the
cancer center and designed by celebrity architect Frank Gehry.
But Kent and his colleague Adrian Walters, the expansion’s project
designer, did not have the luxury of starting from scratch. They
faced something far more challenging.
In
a way, it all goes back to Henry Hobson Richardson, the most renowned
American architect of the late 19 th Century – whose style was so
distinctive it has a name of its own: Richardson Romanesque.
Shepley Bulfinch is the direct descendant of the firm Richardson
founded. History and tradition loom large at place like that.
However,
it is not Richardson but a more recent predecessor, the late Lloyd
Acton, whose storied legacy Kent and Walters confront in this instance.
Acton was the Shepley Bulfinch principal in charge when the firm
designed the original DHMC complex in Lebanon, which opened in 1991.
Kent’s
late colleague designed DHMC “from the inside out,” he explains.
“Lloyd was interested in what motivates people . . . in how people
work in [an architectural] space.”
In
other words, the exterior of DHMC was not the top priority – hence
its resemblance to an office park (and its drive-up porte-cochere
sheltering the entrance, which looks as if it was designed by the
firm’s high school intern). Acton and his client wanted to create
interior spaces that would allow everyone – patients, care-givers,
visitors – to thrive. As a result, for example, the sky-lit mall
along which the complex is organized has become a kind of village
square for the hospital and the world beyond. The mall is cleverly
planned to promote privacy – patients can move via other passageways
– as it welcomes. Inpatient rooms are in pods arrayed around a
central nurse’s station – because studies showed a direct correlation
between success of the hospital stay and distance from that station.
What
Kent and Walters have added to this mix is something even more rare:
spaces for employees that are designed as if those employees really
mattered. It’s one thing to design malls, examining rooms and
inpatient wards that are life-affirming; those are all places the
public frequents. But the cancer center is all about research.
The scientists who work there, in labs and offices, will seldom
if ever encounter patients or their families in their immediate
workplaces.
The
architects credit the cancer center’s director, Dr. Mark Israel,
with being the driving force behind giving the building a sense
of what the director himself calls “distinctiveness, openness and
lightness.” Israel, a pediatric oncologist, points out that the
quest to cure cancer has gone “interdisciplinary” as it has become
more high-tech and complicated. So, Israel decided he wanted his
building to go interdisciplinary as well – while looking sufficiently
inviting to attract the kind of first-rate scientists who are also
courted by the big-city research institutions.
Dartmouth
Medicine, the hospital’s in-house magazine, recently traced
the new cancer center’s architectural lineage to John Portman, famous
for designing tall 1970s hotels with big atriums and lots of balconies.
In truth, the expansion that Israel commissioned is rich and warm
where Portman’s buildings are barren and cold. A more significant
antecedent is the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, completed
in 1984 and designed by the Boston firm of Goody Clancy.
At
the Whitehead Institute, laboratories are also hallways. There
are lounges on each floors, which are connected by open stairways.
Hallways feature chalkboards to facilitate spontaneous scientific
brainstorming. Kent credits the Goody Clancy design with the breakthrough
principle that research buildings ought to be specifically designed
to get the researchers out of their warrens and talking to each
other.
Thus,
at the new Norris Cotton Cancer Center, research spaces on the two
new laboratory floors are open and flexible – what Kent calls “lab
lofts.” The research benches are completely modular, with each
individual furnishing height-adjustable and moveable. They are
arrayed in rows, with a generously large window at one end and what
scientists call the “wet” equipment at the other, where one can
also move from row to row, and access supply rooms, without using
an outside hallway. The lab design does not merely allow, but
actually encourages, wandering and interaction by beckoning the
scientists to the points of junction with nearby lab spaces. Even
the color scheme, warm red and gold, feels more friendly and comfortable
than the traditional Dartmouth green.
Scientific
protocol, not architecture, dictates that no eating take place in
the labs. So, outside the lab spaces on both the sixth and seventh
floors, is a service hallway featuring heavy equipment and a glass
box of a break room. The two glass boxes are interconnected by
a spiral staircase that serves as a kind of inviting sculpture or
folly, humanizing an otherwise-dark space at the core of the building’s
rectangular plan.
The
eighth floor is all private offices. In a big rectangle like the
cancer center, this inevitably means some work spaces lack an outside
window. It is now beyond argument that natural light is the key
to a pleasant office, but it is a reality that most workplaces (including
the 1991 incarnation of DHMC) essentially ignore as too expensive
and complicated to address. Not so at the cancer center, where
a continuous band of clerestory windows seems to separate every
interior wall from the ceiling, allowing the natural light to penetrate
nearly every corner while unifying the complex beneath a continous
plane that appears to float above.
Finally,
both the office floor and the two lab floors open onto a very un-Portman-like
atrium, which is the golden space that from the outside seems ablaze
behind the curtain wall. It is a modest miracle – not as awesome
as the soaring wing-like structure Santiago Calatrava plans for
the train station at the World Trade Center, but still reflecting
a rarity in hospital design: a finely tuned balance between unity
and diversity.
The
unity arises out of the smoothness of the glass curtain wall, the
gold color scheme, the curved acoustical panels that crown the space
(a motif echoed in the labs), an undulating three-story wave of
sculptural glass and, indeed, the very existence of an open space
that brings the separate floors of the building into communion.
Unity also creeps in through details – lines in wood panels and
window panes that correspond to those of the original complex, distinctive
railings, even the specially selected tan-colored pebbles in the
foreground, covering the roof just outside the curtain wall.
Diversity
lies in the varying projections of each floor’s balcony, Walters
having persuaded Kent to break them out in this fashion. One senses
this as well in the various lines in different planes, formed by
covered steel girders just behind the curtain wall – an artful ruse,
it turns out, to deal structural complexities one encounters when
designing atop an existing building. Walters is especially fond
of the ceramic tile floor at the bottom, a custom bird design he
created out of repeating 60 degree angles that pays tribute to M.C.
Escher’s famed interlocking patterns.
One
feature in particular expresses both diversity and unity
– that two feet, eight inches by which the atrium and its curtain
wall project outward. It’s a rebellion against the uniformity
of the rest of DHMC, but it also makes the atrium architecturally
coherent by clearly showing on the outside what’s happening on the
inside. In architectural parlance, the façade expresses the plan.
Israel
speaks proudly of the daily 3:00 tea in the atrium, already a venerable
tradition, and the need to add more chairs and tables to accommodate
all the people who want to use the space. The architects shrug
off the notion of social engineering, an architectural imperative
that went out with 1960s slum clearance, but they do indeed seem
to have created a legitimate social phenomenon with their atrium.
“It’s
how you animate the building, so people experience it as a whole,”
explains Kent. The views offer not just the inspiration of the
evergreen Connecticut River Valley hills, but something less obvious
– a visual connection to the rest of the DHMC complex. Thus, according
to Kent, the cancer center researchers “are always aware there are
other buildings they can have a part of” and therefore gain a sense
of connection to the larger medical enterprise.
Here
is the secret that allowed Kent and Walters to pull this off.
Forget the stereotype of nerds with plastic pocket protectors.
It turns out that scientists make great architectural clients.
“Because
they’re smart people to begin with, they see the virtue of things
early on,” Kent reports. And, when it comes to aesthetics, “they
get it.” According to Kent, “there’s a kind of connection between
music and the scientific mind,” so when he proposed an atrium, the
cancer researchers immediately started imagining performances in
the space.
The
result is Stravinsky to the 1991 hospital’s Haydn, and an excellent
precedent for those wondering how the hospital is spending the rest
of the $224 million. But the real achievement is the example these
scientific researchers set for everyone else in the Upper Valley
who works indoors. Someone around here has finally noticed that
good spaces mean good employees producing good things. It’s a
revolution Jefferson, an architect who knew something about the
pursuit of happiness, would definitely have appreciated.
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